Really pleased to find out that an article that I wrote over the weekend is published on South Belfast News. Many thanks to Catherine and other friends in N Ireland. To see the article as it would appear on the paper, please go the the following link

http://edition.pagesuite-professional.co.uk/Launch.aspx?referral=other&refresh=D0i518Ek9e1W&PBID=005dbf2f-4ece-4ded-9929-e1cd91b8c8c9

Due to space limit, my original work was cut in half. And since I submitted my final draft a little too late, some editorial changes did not feed through. Here 's a full version of what I wrote, for those who are yet to be bored by my tedious writings. 

Convenient Truth is often No-Truth

Issues around China’s human rights record and the country’s relationship with Tibet are more complicated than commonly appreciated. Judgment based on conventional wisdom risk contradicting with not only historical facts, but also common sense

The recent turmoil in Tibet and nearby Chinese provinces has brought China into the centre of media spotlight slightly before what the Chinese authority had originally planned, and for a wildly different reason. In a matter of days, western politicians were quick to jump onto the popular China-bashing bandwagon, condemning the Chinese government for its “heavy-handed crackdown” of a “peaceful protest”. In the meantime, large number of western activists joined force with young exile Tibetans to put on numerous protests around the world against the “gross violation of human rights” and ruthless “cultural genocide” inflicted on the Tibetan people by an evil Communist government.

Despite all the drama and excitement, few questions were raised – with even less analysis done – around whether all the hostility against China is rationally justifiable.

On the 14^th of March, violence broke out on the streets of Lhasa, with hundreds of Tibetan youngsters raging targeted attacks on non-Tibetan residents (including but not limited to Han Chinese) and sabotaging government, as well as commercial properties. The riot came after four days of protests and hunger strikes in some of Lhasa’s largest monasteries, which happened almost in synchrony with a speech delivered by the 14^th Dalai Lama on the 10^th of March in Dharansala, the headquarter of the Tibetan government-in-exile, to mark the 49^th anniversary of what he refered to as a “peaceful uprising” which, in fact, was an armed rebellion instigated by Tibetan aristocrats, assisted by the CIA, and coordinated by two of his brothers Gyalo Thondup and Thubten Norbu - who, among other things, orgainised the training of Khampa guerilla fighters at U.S. military bases in the Pacific island of Saipan and in Camp Hale, Colorado[1]. In his speech, the Dalai Lama, in front of hundreds of supporters, accused the Chinese authority of committing “numerous, unimaginable and gross violations of human rights” and imposing “increased repression and brutality”. At the same time, he also reiterated his “sincere” long-standing support for China’s hosting of this year’s Olympic Games. It is not clear whether His Holiness was trying to fool himself or the millions of people to whom his speech is set to reach; for that if he was indeed as sincere as he claims, the timing of his speech could not be worse. It would sound slightly more convincing if his anniversary remark was an annual event rather than an ad hoc stunt.

Faced with the most severe riot in 20 years, the Chinese authority hesitated to take immediate action to calm the situation and avoid further damage in fear of triggering international criticism. Police and paramilitary forces – the latter of which were only mobilised slowly as the situation showed no sign of improvement – only took defensive positions, firing occasional warning shots and using tear gas to dissipate angry crowds which, before engaging in aggressive attacks on the anti-riot forces, were stoning passers-by, smashing shops, and setting buildings on fire. Even as the riot spread into neighboring provinces of Gansu and Sichuan, with government buildings raided and national flag replaced with the Tibetan flag, the Chinese authority implemented little more than a deterrence-like strategy, using large military presence to encourage rioters to give in[2]. Had such event occured in any other country in the world, swift actions would have been taken to bring the rioters to justice. For that no matter what cause one is pursuing, using violence against innocent people is never morally justifiably. At the same time, irrespective of one’s interpretation of history, Tibet, as of now, is de facto as well as de jure a part of China. Violent separatist activities fueled by ethnic hatred are in little short of acts of terrorism, and should not be tolerated, not to mention glorified.

Some may refute such argument as reiteration of Chinese propaganda which downplays the brutality of China’s suppressive rule over Tibet. Such skepticism is understandable given the sense of secrecy around the way in which the Chinese government administers the country’s internal affairs. It is, however, less understandable that, for some 60 years, popular “Tibetan propaganda” has rarely been placed under the microscope of public scrutiny despite its strong contradiction with voluminous historical records.

It is commonly believed that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) invaded the independent Himalayan state of Tibet in 1950. The reality, however, is more complicated, to say the least. China first started excising sovereign power over Tibet in the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368 AD) during which bureaus and offices were set up in Beijing for the purpose of administering Tibetans affairs. After the fall of Yuan, emperor of the ensuing Ming dynasty retained the administrative institution for the governing of Tibetan affairs. In the Qing Dynasty, which replaced Ming in the 17^th century, China’s sovereignty over Tibet was reinforced by the Regulations for Resolving Tibetan Matters, which established the equal rank of the amban with the Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama, and his direct authority over, among other things, political, military, and communicational matters in Tibet. While the 13^th Dalai Lama did indeed claim independence in 1912 amid the military chaos in China after the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, the Nationalist (KMT) government resumed sovereignty over Tibet through negotiation with the Tibetan government soon after the death of the 13^th Dalai Lama in 1932. The 14^th, i.e. the current, Dalai Lama was in fact enthroned by the KMT government in 1949, months before its flight to Taiwan after being defeated by the Communist army. It is therefore fair to say that when the Communists took over China from the Nationalists, Tibet and China were one whole lot. While some may see the advancing of the PLA into Tibet as incursion into foreign land, from the Communist’s point of view at the time, it was the liberation of another part of China formerly ruled by the corrupt KMT.

History, however, is only a small part of the Tibet issue. In recent years, the Tibetan government in exile has based their campaign primarily on human rights ground, claiming that the Chinese government has carried out brutal, discriminative, and even genocidal policies in Tibet. Such, allegations are usually grossly exaggerated if not plainly untrue. When the Chinese government first took over Tibet, the Tibetan way of life was fully respected – so much so it was almost beyond the level that is morally justifiable. Not only did the Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama remain the co-guardians of Tibet, the exploitive privileges of the Tibetan monks and aristocrats were also maintained. As a result, the Dalai Lama was happy in the earlier years of the Chinese rule – so happy when he attended the 1^st National People’s Congress in Beijing, he presented Mao Zedong, the then Chinese leader, with a hymn composed by himself which praised Mao’s revolution as “timely rain to nourish selfishly the earth”[3]. The situation took a turn in the latter half of the 1950s, when land reformed started to take place in Outer Tibet – part of historical Tibet that was outside Dalai Lama’s jurisdiction and was incorporated into neighboring Chinese provinces since early Qing Dynasty in the 18^th century. Feeling threatened by the reform that distributed land to the serfs and slaves, Tibetan aristocrats instigated numerous riots in the late 1950s, culminating in the CIA assisted military rebellion in 1959, which led to the flight of the Dalai Lama.

Since 1959, policies applied in Tibet largely reflected those in other parts of China - differing only by notably preferential terms. After “Opening and Reform” in 1979, massive public investment has been make to improve the basic infrastructures in Tibet. Today, Tibet is the only province-level administrative region that received central government subsidy that exceeds 100% of local government expenditure (US$12bn between 2002 and 2007). Although still low compared to Western standard, Tibetan farmers and herdsmen enjoy the highest medical coverage among rural Chinese population. Their children are eligible for free education up to senior high school with food and accommodation provided – a rarity in China after the free-market reform. In addition, university entry requirements for ethnic Tibetans are considerably lower compared to those for Han Chinese.  

It would be naïve and ignorant to say that the central government’s policies did not lead to periods of economic devastation and cultural destruction. Such policies, however, were never targeted at Tibet in specific, and were usually well intentioned but poorly designed and even more poorly implemented – the Great Leap Forward being an example. The period that brought the most destruction to Tibetan culture was the Cultural Revolution during which thousands of Buddhist monasteries were either damaged or destroyed. It would, nevertheless, be unfair to describe this period of witch-hunt-like collective-madness as cultural genocide for that the entire Chinese nation suffered in the 10 years of cultural and humanitarian disaster (not just the Tibetans), and that the pattern in which ordinary Tibetans were lured, agitated, and sometimes forced by their local officials (both Han and Tibetan) to participate in destructive activities were not dissimilar to that experienced by Han Chinese. More importantly, after admitting to its policy errors in 1979, the Chinese government has invested significant effort in the past 30 years to rebuild and restore monasteries in the Tibetan area. While such compensational measures are far from sufficient, and indeed could never recover some invaluable treasures that were forever lost, it is in no way reasonable to describe such measure as “ongoing cultural genocide”.

The Chinese government is not perfect. It has made many mistakes in the past, and will continue to make more mistakes. To err, however, is human. As a government that has only abandoned its impractical ideology some 30 years ago, the Chinese is still very much in its infancy.

China is a country with 1.3bn population divided into 56 ethnic groups. The degree of complexity within today’s Chinese society cannot be overlooked when analyzing issues in China. Violation of human rights does indeed exist in China. Like in many other developing countries, such issues arise due primarily to corruption and malpractices within the bureaucratic system and the lack of institutional infrastructure for effective enforcement of law. Addressing such issues require, on the one hand, constructive solutions based on practical understanding of local reality and social dynamics, and, on the other hand, a stable social-economic environment, which the Chinese authority is striving to maintain - whether out of altruism is beside the point. Many Western commentators, as well as politicians, criticize the Chinese authority for depriving its citizens of basic forms of freedom. While there is some truth to such criticism, China is not a sealed pressure cooker as many westerners have come to believe. With over 350,000 Chinese students now studying abroad - whose family and friends largely remain in China - and over a million graduated with overseas degrees – many of whom return to China - the presumption that majority of Chinese people are brainwashed by the incompetent Chinese authority that cannot even make a sound case in front of the international community of its legitimate effort to calm a violent riot is against common sense. Chinese do not rebel not because they are stupid or indifferent. It is because they, as full-time eye-witnesses, know that things are, if not more than, just fine.